February 3, 2014

A New Approach from USAID: Nature, Wealth and Power 2.0

Kedar Mankad

On January 27th, 2014, USAID launched a second version of their framework for natural resource management, Nature Wealth and Power 2.0 (NWP 2.0) at the first of 4 ECO (Environmental Communication, Learning and Outreach) events focusing on knowledge management. NWP 2.0 is USAID’s newly updated framework for practitioners involved in the design, implementation, and evaluation of natural resource-based rural development activities. It builds upon the foundation of the original NWP with practical experiences and lessons from a decade of implementation. NWP 2.0 utilizes the three lenses of nature, wealth, and power to focus on the process of analyzing existing relationships between economic, social and natural capital. In viewing these as an integrated framework, this report will help practitioners understand the context of their project from multiple perspectives, focusing on the complex social, political, and natural relationships that exist in a particular landscape.

"Beneficiaries in Bangladesh" by Jeff Holt, USAID

“Beneficiaries in Bangladesh” by Jeff Holt, USAID

NWP as a process provides USAID’s first attempt at a true political economy approach. Bringing the dimensions of power and wealth, such as strengthening natural capital accounting and resource tenure systems into a natural resources management program at an input level allows practitioners to work towards positive outputs across all three dimensions. This can in practice lead to more integrated programming, including a more complete understanding by practitioners of what they are integrating and why.

This analysis of political economy is critical to effective natural resource management programming. However, in order to truly take root within development programming, the framework must be taken up by across USAID’s programs; in particular economic development and agriculture. This dialogue, bringing together staff from across the agency, has the potential to be another step towards the cross-program utilization that will be necessary for effective interventions.

In order to further develop such integration across programs, NWP 2.0 can benefit from emphasis on spatial framing. Using the landscape as a reference point, different programs can work towards creating cross-sector collaboration and multi-stakeholder participation to reduce trade-offs and increase synergies between multiple stakeholders. The distribution of nature, wealth and capital is affected by geography, and USAID, as a primary actor in many of these landscapes, is positioned to be a convener of stakeholders across its portfolio.

An important question raised at the launch event was directed towards the time-scale of projects, and whether the NWP 2.0 framework would lead to a reevaluation of the traditional 5-year project timeline used by many USAID projects. It is evident that in order to achieve impacts at scale, longer-term investments are necessary – officials at USAID pointed to the need to justify expenditures to citizens, and therefore the need to set up monitoring and evaluation systems that could show medium-term impacts that could be presented were important to extend project cycles.

There remain several key questions for NWP 2.0 going forward. First, will it be applied throughout USAID natural resource management programs? Second, what other specific ways will USAID operationalize NWP 2.0? Finally, will this framework be utilized across sectors to create true integrated development throughout USAID? NWP 2.0 is an exciting framework, and the previous version was influential in framing natural resource management in the past ten years. The opportunity available now is to promote a shift in broader development programming to continue the process of integration.

Photo: “Beneficiaries in Bangladesh” by Jeff Holt, U.S. Agency for International Development
 
 
 
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